1. An Overview of Phoneme Identification

When we say a child is proficient at phoneme identification, it means they can hear and distinguish the individual phonemes in spoken words accurately and automatically. Phoneme identification is a skill that will help students both with sounding out words and with spelling words.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken language, like the /b/ sound in the word bee, for example. And, as you can probably tell, phonemes combine to form words, like /b/ and /ē/ combine to make bee. The practical focus of phoneme identification lessons is to teach students to isolate individual phonemes in different positions of words — beginning, end, and middle, in that order. 

Here's a simple way to approach it. You may ask students,

What is the first sound in the word pot?  

/p/

And here’s a teacher asking her students to isolate an ending sound:

Another way students practice phoneme identification is by identifying the same phoneme in more than one word. You could say,

What sound is the same in these words: pot, cat, bat? 

/t/

It's found at the end of the word.

And it can look like this:

A third approach to practicing phoneme identification is by having students identify a phoneme that is different within a group of words. Say,

The words are pot, cat, and bat. 

Which word has a different middle sound? 

pot

Watch students categorize phonemes in a small group:

It’s pretty simple, and it’s often fun to teach. We’ll show you how to do it.